For Kate McGarrigle’s Birthday-Yeah, Talk To Me Of Mendocino-The Voices From Up North The Music Of The McGarrigles 

By Zack James

“Jesus, Seth did you hear that Kate McGarrigle of the McGarrigle Sister had passed away,” lamented Jack Callahan to his old-time high school friend and fellow folk music aficionado Seth Garth. Seth replied that since he no longer wrote music reviews for anybody, hadn’t since The Eye the newspaper that he had written for had gone out of business that he did not always keep up with the back stories of those who were still left standing in the ever decreasing old-time folk performer world. Jack’s sad information though got Seth to thinking about the times back in the early 1970s when he and Jack had gone out to Saratoga Springs to visit a cousin of Sam Lowell, also an old time friend and part-time folk aficionado, who lived in nearby Ballston Spa and had invited them to go to the Caffe Lena to listen to a couple of young gals from Canada who would make the angels weep for their inadequate singing voices. In those days Seth was free-lancing for The Eye so he had called Oakland, California where the newspaper then had its offices to see if they would spring for a review, a paid review of the performance. They agreed although there was the usual haggling over money and whether they would actually use the sketch.            

That night after Lena’s introduction (Lena the legendary, now legendary owner and operator of the coffeehouse) the McGarrigle Sisters did two sparking sets, a few songs in French, since they were steeped in the increasing bilingual Quebec culture which was demanding French language equality in the heated nationalist period when many were looking for independence. They also did a wonderful cover Heart Like A Wheel, a song that Linda Rhonstadt had had a hit with. But the song that Seth found his hook on, the one that he would center on to insure that his piece was published (and paid for) was Talk To Me Of Mendocino, their homage to Lena who desired to go out and see the place along the rocky ledges of Northern California, land’s end. (Whether Lena ever went out there subsequently Seth was not sure but he rather thought not since she was totally committed to the club in those days, was something of a homebody and perhaps wanted the memory than the actual experience.)    

Seth mentioned to Jack that night that the sisters had evoked just the right mournful tone in presenting the song, and recalled how majestic they had thought they place was when they and their wives (Seth’s first  wife, first of three, all failed, Martha, and Jack’s one and only Kathy) had gone from San Francisco up the Pacific Coast Highway and basically stumbled on the place with its sheer rock formations, fierce ocean waves beating against the rocks and the then quaint and unadorned town that sat just off the rocks then. So Seth was able to close his eyes and envision travelling from the overheated, over-crowded over-wrought East and pinpoint a map to head out West “where the rocks remain.” The rocks, the ocean, our mother and some solitude in world gone mad with having to run away from what it had built. Seth was sorry that he had not been back there in many years. Hoped that Lena did get to gout to the rocks and glad that Kate and Anna McGarrigle spoke of the place, made it immortal in song.